Discrimination of iron deficiency anemia from other anemia by multiple discriminant analysis of routine blood count and red cell distribution width.

A computer aided diagnostic program, MDA-3 (Multiple Discriminant Analysis) was designed for clinical use. MDA-3 employs CBC data to analyze using a technique of two-group linear discriminant analysis (a type of multivariate analysis) of anemia and polycythemia. MDA-3 is given discriminant knowledge obtained from a database of 7 CBC items and red cell distribution width (RDW) from 14 groups. We collected 851 CBC data of hematologic abnormalities, designed MDA-3 for IDA screening and evaluated the program's efficacy. The number of cases discriminated as IDA group in the first and the second rank by MDA-3 is up to 80.7%. If false negative cases whose degree of probability is similar to the IDA group are considered as the IDA suspicion group, the diagnostic rate becomes 84.9%. This result demonstrates that MDA-3 is useful for screening of IDA.